The Fuzzy Front Ends: Reflections on the Never-Ending Story of Visualization Co-Design

2026-02-13

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Computer Vision: Visual Reasoning & Symbolic Representations

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Co-design is an increasingly popular approach in HCI and visualization, yet there is little guidance on how to effectively apply this method in visualization contexts. In this paper, we visually present our experience of a two-and-a-half-year co-design project with the local arts community. Focusing on facilitating community exploration and sense-making around arts funding distribution, the project involved a series of co-design sessions between visualization researchers and members of the arts community. Through these iterative sessions, we built shared understanding and developed visualization prototypes tailored to community needs. However, the practice is far from complete, and we found ourselves continually returning to the"fuzzy front end"of the co-design process. We share this ongoing story through comic-style visuals and reflect on three fuzzy front ends that we encountered during the project. By sharing these experiences with the visualization community, we hope to offer insights that others can draw on in their own community-engaged co-design work.

Problem

• co-design
• visualization
• fuzzy front end
• community engagement
• HCI

Innovation

• co-design
• fuzzy front end
• community engagement
• visualization
• participatory design